Santa Clara University

About Claudia Bernardi

Not only does Claudia assist in the excavation process, speaking out on human rights violations, but her art is informed by her own experience. She is committed to the use of art as an educational tool.

In El Salvador, she has founded the School of Art and Open Studio program of Perquin, located less than five miles from the site of El Mozote, where the massacre occurred in 1981. Now she is taking that model of collective recollection and art-making and finding transformative results working with refugees, survivors and at-risk youth in other countries such as Canada, the United States and Guatemala.

An internationally renowned artist who works in the fields of human rights and social justice, Ms. Bernardi has exhibited her work in over 40 solo exhibitions. In all of her work over the past two decades - whether as an artist through installation, sculpture, and printmaking, as an educator through teaching and lecturing, or as a participant in human rights investigations - she has impacted thousands of people with her integrity, compassion, and truthfulness. She is an artist who has witnessed monstrous atrocities and unspeakable human tragedies, yet speaks of these horrors in ways that communicate the persistence of hope, undeniable integrity, and necessary remembrance.

Community members who are interested in El Salvador and Latin America in general will find her approach to be critical for our times. Those who have partaken in immersion trips or who hope to someday travel to El Salvador will not want to miss this dynamic and inspiring event.

Please visit the walls of hope website at:
http://www.wallsofhope.org/

Links to articles by Claudia Bernardi
Links to artwork by Claudia Bernardi

Please join us for this remarkable lecture by one of the world's most profound thinkers on the arts and human rights.

Carolyn Silberman and Kristin Kusanovich

Co-Directors of the Justice and the Arts Initiative,

College of Arts and Sciences, Santa Clara University